If you are trying to get more veggies into your diet then this Hidden Vegetable Pasta Sauce is for you! It’s full of all of the wonderful Summertime vegetables, including sweet peppers, zucchini, squash, and of course tomatoes.
Hidden Vegetable Pasta Sauce
I love vegetables and I especially love growing my own vegetables. Home-grown veggies taste so much better when they are fresh from the garden and I love that I produced it on my own. This year, not all of our vegetable plants produced very much, but we did get a ton of tomatoes. I love using all of my home-grown tomatoes for snacks or to make my Old School Italian Gravy. With the rest of our Summer vegetables, I usually will make this Hidden Vegetable Pasta Sauce at least once. My kids are pretty good about eating their vegetables, but this is a great way to sneak in a bunch of veggies for those picky eaters, young and old alike!
What Vegetables Should I Use?
For this sauce, you don’t have to stick to the veggies that I have listed in the recipe, feel free to use what you have on hand or any of your favorites. For this recipe, I used sweet peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, and tomatoes, but here are some other vegetables that would be good as well:
- Carrots
- Kale
- Eggplant
- Spinach
- or any squash variety!
How to Make Hidden Vegetable Pasta Sauce
Once you have decided on the vegetables you are going to use, now it’s time to make the sauce!
- Chop all of your vegetables into similar sized pieces for even cooking.
- Saute in olive oil until the vegetables are tender. Make sure to use a large enough pan! This one is my fav 🙂
- Add in tomato sauce and cook the vegetables down even more until they are very soft.
- Blend all of the vegetables and sauce till smooth. Depending on your blender, you may need to work in batches. Here is the blender I use in my kitchen and it blends this sauce amazingly!
- Return your sauce to the pan to heat through, season and serve!
This recipe is both gluten free and vegetarian, but you can omit the cheese and make it vegan as well! I usually like to make a big batch of sauce and store it in the freezer for later use. The recipe below will yield approximately 6 cups of sauce which should be enough for about 2 pounds of pasta. You can use store bought dried pasta or try my Homemade Spinach Fettuccine for even more vegetable goodness!
Hidden Vegetable Pasta Sauce
Ingredients
- 1 medium red bell pepper
- 1 medium orange bell pepper
- 1 medium zucchini
- 1 medium yellow summer squash
- 3 medium tomatoes
- ¼ cup olive oil
- ½ teaspoons kosher salt
- ¼ teaspoon black pepper
- 1 28 oz can tomato sauce
- 1 teaspoon garlic powder
- ½ cup grated pecorino romano cheese
Instructions
- Roughly chop all of the vegetables and set aside.
- Heat a large saute pan on medium heat and add in olive oil. Once olive oil is heated, add in peppers, zucchini, squash, and tomatoes. Saute for 10 minutes until vegetables are softened and starting to cook down.
- Add in tomato sauce, turn the heat down to medium low and simmer for 15-20 minutes or until vegetables are completely cooked down and easy mashed with a wooden spoon.
- Add the sauce to a blender and thoroughly blend until smooth. Depending on the size of blender used, this may need to be done in two batches.
- Once sauce has been blended, add it back into your pan and add in garlic powder and pecorino romano cheese. Stir to combine. Sauce can then be served over pasta or cooled and frozen for later use.
Notes
I hope you enjoyed this recipe for my Hidden Vegetable Pasta Sauce. Make sure you comment below and let me know what your favorite Summertime vegetable recipes are!
Happy Cooking!
